Roundabout
"Oof, what the hell. Why is my shoulder so stiff?"
The last day of May — and the first glimpse of June on the horizon. And on the very day a new series was set to begin, Noh In-seong dragged himself out of bed feeling like a rusted hinge.
Had he beaten the ball senseless yesterday, gobbling up a 4-for-5 night with a home run tacked on for six RBIs? Or should he have simply gone to rest instead of to the ballpark, like a well-behaved adult?
"My body's in... really rough shape?!"
It seemed a red alert had gone up for Noh In-seong's health, but.
"Ah. It's raining."
Shshshshshsh—!!
It wasn't. Spread out before his eyes was the joint handiwork of the peninsula's heat and humidity: the start of the rainy season, that stretch when rainfall spiked without warning.
"Hold on. I'm not even twenty yet... and I can already feel rain coming in my joints?"
So this was a mental-age problem, not a physical one? Seriously? He was still chewing on that question when—
"Hey! In-seong! You said you were eating early today! You told me to wake you up!"
BANG BANG BANG...!!
"I said knock on the door, not demolish it, you lunatic captain!"
His leisurely hotel-breakfast fried eggs were cut tragically short by Jo In-soo's fist against the door. The unpleasant, uneasy start of the Incheon road trip had begun with something utterly trivial.
"Mmm! As always, this hotel has the best food of anywhere we stay. Probably because things are usually going badly for us here."
Good grief. This guy is always an optimist the moment food is involved.
"Isn't that only because every time we come to Incheon, we normally get our clocks cleaned?"
"Cough! Hack! Hkk...!!"
"Ew, gross. Your nose is not an organ for spitting food back out, In-soo hyung."
How does this man sit down and run his breathing in reverse? And a fine show to you too, first thing in the morning.
"Khek...!! Hey! Anyone watching would think we've caught some kind of curse on Incheon road trips!"
"Isn't that exactly what it is? It's why our win rate only crawled back above .500 after I got called up."
For a certain "stretch of time," the Doubles had been played for complete suckers by the Incheon Astro.
Incheon was a club that forced choices on its opponents chiefly through violent, punishing play — a team that kept its record afloat by sweeping wins off particular opponents, and the Doubles had been the single biggest victim of that strategy.
It wasn't as if they had no players capable of getting angry, but Incheon was one team that banded together tight under a massive villain at the top and charged as a pack. One player losing his temper didn't put so much as a dent in the way they played.
"...Well, now that they freeze up just from looking at you, it is a bit easier."
"Not far enough. I'll keep the pressure on until they can't even bring themselves to look us in the eye."
Those days were over. The sorcery that had made a playing career — not just a play — vanish before everyone's eyes had not yet been dispelled.
When one player properly lost his mind, they started facing constraints not on their play, but on their lives. The old tactic — act like a rabid dog and the opponent automatically turns passive — no longer worked on them.
The human muzzle, Noh In-seong, had prepared another grand piece of stage magic for his third encounter with Incheon.
Entirely unintentionally, of course.
"How did it come to this?"
In the Incheon Astro front office, the general manager clutched his head in his hands. This was, after all, a team that normally spent this point of the season frolicking near the top of the standings.
They had prepared diligently this season too. They had drafted the rookies the manager wanted and kept the core roster intact.
The player he had truly wanted had slid down the draft board, and with the manager clearly unenthusiastic about him anyway, the GM had kept quiet about it. And now the very player he'd coveted was tearing the team he'd built cleanly in two.
The team captain — a man called up to the national team even as a backup second baseman — had gone down for the season, first to a leg injury and now to a hit-by-pitch. The starting catcher, a man who'd absorbed a truck-collision's worth of impact from a single on-field collision, had eaten a spear tackle and departed for the afterlife... no, the hospital.
"And now what is this?!"
This time it was the center fielder stirring up trouble.
Incheon's starting center fielder, Ji Yong-jae, was scared out of his skull — like a mad dog that had caught a beating somewhere and crawled back home.
According to the explanation from the operations staff, he was refusing to take the field, insisting that bastard had him in his crosshairs.
"Ah. This really is beyond managing."
The Incheon GM urgently called in the reporters.
If nothing else, to reassure everyone that his organization protected its own.
"That damned rookie, Noh In-seong, has brought a ghost into Korean baseball. The ghost of injury."
Anyone listening would think you people never once set foot inside that injury factory of yours. Honestly.
"I cannot for the life of me understand letting a brat like that run wild. The press and the league association should have cracked down hard."
Setting aside the fact that such lectures usually ended up aimed at their own conduct, it was a stinging rebuke.
"A player threatening a fellow player? We cannot stand idly by. We strongly denounce Noh In-seong."
The Incheon GM's message was simple. Summarized, it amounted to: 'What exactly did you say to our center fielder?'
It meant: in the next series, don't so much as lay a finger on our players. Keep your head down and behave.
With a player pool riddled with holes, winning was already hard enough — and now they were being asked to take the field without the one man who actually fought them like a real opponent. To the people who sincerely believed their record could still rebound, it looked like chess with the rook and the bishop both removed.
In a situation like that, there was no way to win — not unless it was chess-boxing, where you were allowed to pummel your opponent.
Though, granted, the fact that the opponent would much rather box was a problem for another day.
"Yes, yes. You're absolutely right. Everyone who played a career-on-the-line game against this hyung is currently enjoying hospital food."
And Noh In-seong's media response on the matter took an even harder line.
"Also, word is there's still someone alive on that team among the men who've tried to do me physical harm."
...White rice porridge. Guess I'd better get cooking, huh? — which was, for all intents and purposes, an official public declaration.
"This isn't a threat. Someone once told me it's a matter of technique."
Noh In-seong capped it off with a beaming smile.
"I could accidentally switch gloves mid-play, or make a mistake in the course of a throw to first, couldn't I?"
—He might. Then again, he might not.
Not a shred of remorse. Not a shred of regret, either. He slept at night with both legs stretched out nice and straight.
"B-but shouldn't you still visit the hospital? Pay your respects, bring flowers, something?"
To the reporter who asked the perfectly sensible question — and what about the people hospitalized because of you?
"Go stand there with a hypocritical face and shake their hands? The second I saw their smiling faces, I'd spit on them."
Noh In-seong trampled, in a single stroke, the accumulated life wisdom built upon his ancestors' database.
"Our ancestors simply never learned the fundamentals. That's what you get for teaching nonsense like the theory of innate human goodness."
—Mencius was wrong. From this day forward, Xunzi rules this land!
The living, breathing embodiment of the doctrine that human nature is evil, Noh In-seong slapped away Incheon's every move.
"Uhh... uh. Manager. Is this really true?"
Incheon's center fielder, Ji Yong-jae, put the question to Jeong Yong-jun with his face carved out of pure terror.
The front office had applied pressure through the media, and the opponent hadn't cared one bit — he had simply counterattacked. And now, starting him in this climate? There was a demon out there who would treat it as an opportunity and finish the job for good.
"Pull yourself together! Even that punk still has to mind what society thinks of him, at least a little!"
—If he truly didn't, there'd be a new injury victim every single game. And that's not the case, is it?
Jeong Yong-jun remained coldly rational. Last season, on bitterly disappointing results, his team had barely scraped into the postseason on a technicality.
The single reason he still gripped the manager's chair amid this storm was one thing: results. And those results were built, one way or another, on the teams they fleeced.
Fleece the suckers, split the rest of the schedule down the middle, and the standings took care of themselves.
But the moment they weakened, those suckers had begun grabbing them by the collar in return. Busan, wholly indifferent to its own record, hosted one epic shitshow after another with the rest of the wounded pack. Daejeon had gone so far as to field its ace outright and started sniping back. The Gray Bear refused to dole out honeyed generosity any longer, and the Twins had gone and dragged their own evil twins in from god knew where.
From Jeong Yong-jun's position, he had to stop the free fall in the standings and win — even if it meant total war. And in the middle of all this, he was supposed to let his starting center fielder sit out because he was frightened? Not a chance.
"We're running the media campaign nonstop as it is, aren't we? Nobody can pull anything sneaky in the middle of this!"
So get out there and play the way you always play!
"...Uh... still, just in case — does that mean I don't have to throw any of those tackles at that guy?"
Jeong Yong-jun re-drilled the still-hesitating Ji Yong-jae from top to bottom and shoved him out the door.
"Haah. Managing is genuinely hell."
"Haah, managing is genuinely hell. Doesn't it ever get old for you?"
"It's a thrill every single time. Shall we call it the bittersweet aftertaste of a beautiful victory?"
Shame the chocolate that was already sitting here got suddenly swapped out for a whole new box. But it does taste good.
Noh In-seong was once again leisurely helping himself to the snacks stocked in the manager's office, uninvited.
"Fine, whatever. You're buying me two cups next time. So — what are you planning to do about Ji Yong-jae?"
"Do about what? Leave him alone. Nothing's going to happen out of shortstop this series."
Jeong Im-taek looked at In-seong with very strange eyes.
"I figured you'd opt for a 100-percent-guaranteed revenge, so I was even toying with moving you to second base..."
"That's only because their infielders keep throwing dogshit tackles at our second basemen. Or at me. In the first place."
Noh In-seong gazed back at Jeong Im-taek with a look of mild, wounded innocence.
Honestly, I don't have any particular intention of hurting players. What exactly do you take me for?
That was how In-seong looked at his manager — while the manager thought:
'Hmph. There's no stopping this brat from causing an incident mid-game anyway...'
Letting out a long sigh, Jeong Im-taek told In-seong to get back to training, then muttered:
"Ah, damn it. Should I seriously look into a six-man rotation?"
And he fell to genuinely wondering when the next trade window would open.
blissfully unaware that if so much as a single tradeable body still existed out there, it would be a miracle.
Before first pitch, the home plate umpire walked over to me wearing a serious face.
"There are an awful lot of people watching this one. If a throw happens to go astray, or..."
"It won't. I'm playing shortstop today. By the way — those dogshit tackles. You are going to clamp down on them properly, right?"
My statement — which said, in every way but words, if you don't, we have nothing left to discuss — got a nod out of the umpire.
"Let's just keep things quiet today. I've no wish to be dragged into a headache of a brawl."
"Relax. I'll only stage incidents that would happen on any ordinary day."
—Though if the opportunity presents itself, I absolutely will not hold back.
The umpire scurried off toward the opposing dugout, doing his level best not to hear Noh In-seong's ominous words. He intended to tell their side to watch itself too, seeing as the whole country would be tuned in today.
And then, in the bottom of the fourth, with a runner on first—
"You son of a bitch, you're ripping my entire team out by the roots! You're trying to ruin me...!!"
"Ooh, so that means you're done for, mister? Hey, guys! Guys! You should get down there too! He's finished!"
The manager who had erupted onto the field. The player writhing on the ground. The opposing team's players performing teabags over the whole scene.
"Ah, shit. It is technically the kind of thing that happens on an ordinary day, but...."
And the home plate umpire — hand pressed to his forehead, struggling to keep his surging blood pressure in check — finally understood.
'Oho! Let the game explode!'
This one madman had blown the entire game sky-high with some incomprehensible, otherworldly ability.